Want to earn more money?

During the Summer I attended an excellent conference by the Education and Employers Taskforce. They are commissioned to review and produce research looking at the engagement of employers with education. Does what it says on the tin. Their monthly bulletin has been the source of lots of our rationale for running ’employability’ events (see the Events tab). The conference addressed many of the issues that we have discussed on this website over the last few
years but one piece of recent research really stood out.

Who has heard of the National Cohort Study? Nope, me neither until recently. It is a randomised study looking at the progress through life of all the babies born in a random week in 1970 (about 18000 participants). It is still ongoing although with the inevitable drop out and loss of contact with some subjects (still about 8000 participating). Every few years the research team would get in touch with the subjects and ask them questions about their life. The questions are often aimed at key issues that certain age groups might be mainly concerned with. For example in 1986 many of the questions were about school leaving issues and about career guidance, work experience and so on. Forward fast to some of the more recent data and the average earnings of the subjects are revealed beyond the age of 40. What the E&E team have done with this data is try to correlate the incidence of employer engagement by the end of school with current earnings.

They did find a correlation…in fact they have found a very significant statistical correlation. Their data suggests that for every input, experience or contact that you received at school from someone in the world of work, your current earnings will be 0.4% higher. This applies to the most educated as it does to the least…across the board. So you will most likely earn 1.2% more than the person with the same qualifications as you if you had three more experiences. Sounds pretty unlikely doesn’t it but by digging around the literature there are several examples of recent studies from the US and the UK that actually put the figure higher…though with smaller sample sizes.

Now have a look at our Events page and tell me which ones you want your children involved in, I’ll give them 0.4% more wage each week for every one that they attend!

We have changed some of the booking requirements for events this year. Most events can accept 12 pupils from any one school but you can send different sets of 12 on different days. So for example, you can send 12 children on the first STEM day…they will come back excited and telling all their classmates about it which creates a buzz; then another 12 can go to the next STEM day a few months later and so on. That way there can be a sustained effect from the events rather than just coming to one a year. Several schools have already booked in a whole year’s worth of events for each class to create a sustained programme for their school.

One further change is that where we have enough external funding for pupil based events, we are able to offer it at no charge. For some events though we will be asking for a nominal fee of £60 per participating school to help offset the cost. This charge does not apply to R&C schools because they already fund the building. We are also offering this to any Trust, Alliance or other(!) where multiple bookings for room hire or on courses shows that they are contributing to the cost of Inspire2Learn. Please contact Andrew for details.